excellent—in its way, but the unfortunate
patentee never had money with which to bring
it to the notice of the public.  He might be able
to bring in three or four good men as directors,
but that was all.  Where could he get the four
or five hundred pounds that were necessary to
advertise, hire offices, print several thousand
copies of a prospectus, and do all the hundred
needful things that must be done before a
ioint-stock affair can be floated?  In his
dilemma he would come to us. We agreed to
provide everything—for a consideration, of
course.  We took upon ourselves all the
expenses of advertising; we got the prospectus
published, and lent the prestige of our name;
we puffed, wrote up, and praised the scheme
through our several agents. If the project died
before the shares were allotted, we got nothing
—there was nothing to get—for our trouble.
If it "floated," we received a premium of from
five to twenty thousand pounds out of the first
deposits paid. We were in most cases winners.
For our immense fee, we had not pledged
ourselves to anything.  If any company we
"brought out" had come to grief, we should
not have lost sixpence by it.  On the contrary,
there was more than one concern which had
been launched into the world under the shadow
of our wing, and which died a natural death.
But what cared we?  Our fee had been paid—
it was always the very first charge which had
to be paid—and it was of no consequence to
us whether or not the young company lived or
died.

After the first six months we declared a
dividend upon our paid-up capital, at the rate
of thirty per cent per annum; besides putting
aside some twenty thousand pounds as the
commencement of a reserve fund.

What surprised me, was the ease with which
I got over my duties as managing director of
the "GENERAL HOUSE AND LAND FINANCE
AND CREDIT COMPANY." Before becoming a
director in this undertaking, I had had no
financial experience whatever. However, I
managed to do pretty good yeoman's work.
As time went on, I got accustomed to the
business, and not ill versed in the various
ways of making money for the concern.
Smithson, our secretary, also got through his duties
well, and any one not knowing our antecedents,
would have hardly believed that we were both
mere ex-soldiers, who hardly knew on which side
of the ledger to write the debit and on which
the credit of an account.

But fortune favoured us. Shortly after
our company commenced business, a new
species of joint-stock fever broke out suddenly.
Every firm in which the partners were getting
old, or of which the affairs were at the
foundation a little shaky, seemed determined to
make the concern a joint- stock company.
Hitherto such undertakings had been got up
by individual promoters, and had assumed a
name which indicated what business they
intended doing.  But now we had "SMITH
AND Co. (LIMITED);" "JONES, WILSON, AND
Co. (LIMITED);"  "MASON, WATSON, AND Co.
(LIMITED);" and a hundred other companies
of the sort cropping up in every day's Times.
As our credit stood good, and as we had the
good sense to ask fees for launching new
concerns which were lower than those of other
similar companies, we obtained a good deal of
work. It is true that we had sometimes to
put a bold face upon introducing to the public
something that would not bear a very close
investigation. And one case of this sort I will
relate in another chapter.

BEAUTIFUL GIRLS.

WHEN I was younger than I am now, was
particular about my waistcoats, and carried a
sense of my whiskers about with me like a
solemn responsibility, I was accustomed, when
called upon at evening parties and other high
festivals, to sing, in a sentimental and foolish
tenor, a song called " The Maids of Merry
England, How beautiful are they!"  I remember
I used to sing both at the beginning of the
verse and at the end of the verse; and I sung
it with becoming gravity, as if it had been a
patriotic toast or a sentiment about the wing
of friendship. I have now in my mind's eye
a vision of myself singing that song; and
the vision is suggestive of something, on the
whole, idiotic. Every hair of my head is in its
proper place, glistening with macassar; my
whiskers are carefully brushed out to make the
most of them; my waistcoat is spotless; my
white handkerchief is redolent of the latest
perfume; and there I stand at the piano with a
chest like a pouter pigeon, my head in the air,
and my eyes on the ceiling, singing —The Maids
of Merry England, How beautiful are they, with
all the gravity proper to the execution of a
sacred song from an oratorio. I remember that
the maids of merry England who were privileged
to listen to me sat around with their hands
folded, and looked grave and solemn, as if it
had been a sad truth that I was reminding them
of.  I don't think that there was any moral to
the effect that beauty was only skin deep, and was
doomed to fade, and that flesh, though fair, was
only grass; but it was in that admonitory sense
we took the sentiment, and it checked our
levity, and made us all very seriously and
solemnly happy. Ah me! those days of
sentiment and flowered waistcoats are gone—gone,
I fear, never to return. I now sing what are
called comic songs, at evening parties, and
instead of being sentimental about the unadorned
beauty of the maids of merry England, am
lyrically facetious about their crinolines and
their back hair.

This is a pity; for in these days the maids of
merry England have made themselves so very
attractive, that it would be easy to be both
sentimental and poetical about them. The
sentiment, when I used to sing that song, was a
mere formula. It was like singing about hearts
of oak, Britannia, the ocean, and all that sort